Data Science and Expanding Our Sources of Ethical Inspiration

By Luke Stark & Anna Lauren Hoffmann, CTSP Fellows | Permalink Recent public controversies regarding the collection, analysis, and publication of data sets about sensitive topics—from identity and sexuality to suicide and emotion—have helped push conversations around data ethics to the fore. In popular articles and emerging scholarly work (some of it supported by our backers at CTSP), scholars, practitioners and policymakers have begun to flesh out the longstanding conceptual and practical tensions expressed not only in the notion of “data ethics,” but in related categories such as “data science,” “big data,” and even plain old “data” itself. Against this uncertain and controversial backdrop, what kind of ethical commitments might bind those who work with data—for example, researchers, analysts, and (of course) data scientists? One impulse might be to claim…